


nor'easter

by lockjawed



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: 2019-2020 NHL Season, California, Detroit Red Wings, Gen, I Don't Think The Wings Are A Very Good Hockey Team You Guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 02:44:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21487039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lockjawed/pseuds/lockjawed
Summary: California? Is fucking weird, man.
Relationships: Dylan Larkin & Tyler Bertuzzi & Anthony Mantha & Andreas Athanasiou
Comments: 10
Kudos: 31





	nor'easter

**Author's Note:**

> stan the wings we have nothing to lose

California is—fucking weird, Dylan thinks. The people out here don’t know the frigid, face-numbing bliss of some serious, homegrown pond hockey. They’ve got late-spring-in-Michigan weather year round, don’t even need to own a winter jacket. Hats are a nonessential accessory. Dylan doesn’t understand how anybody in this part of the country can keep track of the time passing when having leaves on the trees is nothing to go by.

And the rinks—god, the fucking rinks. Oppressive as hell, dark gray and dingy. Lit like an open casket funeral, all shadows and no flattery. Dylan skates a lap, thinking that the air in here is still warmer than the weather back in Detroit is, currently being buried under eight inches of snow, iced and salted cyclically. Talk about pond hockey. Woodward’s a speed skating track by now.

Mo glides over and hip checks him lightly into the boards. His helmet hits the glass and bounces, but it doesn’t hurt. “Wake up, Larkin,” he says. “You, me, and Tuzzi. Warmups.”

Tuzzi’s on the blue line playing hacky-sack with a puck and Athanasiou, trying to land the rubber on top of one of their helmets. It’s not exactly motivating.

“I can’t believe we’re not starting,” Dylan finally says. Mo rolls his eyes and hooks Dylan’s calf with the end of his stick and starts skating backwards, trying to drag him. Dylan would never say it, but it all feels a little like failure. The low hum of people filling the arena grows and grows. He pokes Mo’s stick away and skates after him, closer to center ice. “I don’t get it. Bert nearly got a hat trick Thursday. We were good, weren’t we? I thought we were pretty good.”

Tyler hits himself in the head with a puck when they make it within earshot of him. “Whatever, man,” Tyler says. Doesn’t matter how long Dylan’s played with him, his eye still goes straight to Tuzzi’s missing tooth. “You think too much. And hey, second is the best, right?”

A low cheer goes up on the other end of the rink. Jones is in the net taking slapshots, and stopping most of them. Pretty-ass glove saves, clean as hell.

“You think we could just kill their goalie?” Anthony says, watching.

Dylan glances at Andreas gravely. “That definitely wouldn’t be vegan.”

“Oh, Larkin’s got jokes now, huh?” Tuzzi says, cackling. Andreas laughs and skates off to run drills with Val and Fabbri, goad Cholowoski into defending against them. “Anyone seen Blashill? If he’s not looking, we can keep doing hacky-sack.”

The cheer keeps on humming. Dylan doesn’t want to play the sharks tonight. And like, who is he kidding—nobody wants to play the goddamn Sharks, ever. They’ve got some seriously botched energy, like some fancy Californian plastic surgeon did a real jacked up rhinoplasty on the collective face of their hockey. He wants the bright red haze of LCA, the tinny computer generated bass of the world’s worst goal song in the history of ever. 

It’s rebuild year. They’re not even supposed to be good. Half the roster right now is pulled up off the Griffins, Hronek’s out, Abby’s got god-knows-what wrong with him, the lines are fucked, defense is megafucked, his legs might fall off if they go into overtime again, and it’s a coin flip on what kind of game they’re gonna get out of Jimmy tonight. Who wants to rumble with the sharks when they’re like _ this _? 

After all, they’re a species known to eat tires.

  
  


Shooutouts are...well, shit, if Dylan’s being honest. He wishes there could just be a second OT like they do in pro soccer. Blashill’s throwing him out there third, dead last, which frankly feels like divine punishment for missing on that breakaway so miserably in overtime. He choked, went wide. Jones is a wall. Or maybe he got sent out here ‘cause Blashill saw his line screwing around during warm-ups. Either way, by the time they get to Dylan’s penalty shot, they’re down by one point. He doesn’t want to be dramatic, but he feels like he’s fucking Atlas.

Dylan’s pretty sure he’s gonna choke again. He doesn’t even know why he’s out here, really. Last time he could bear to check his shootout stats, he was zero for nine. He doesn’t have a go-to move, and if he did, he doesn’t think it’d fool Jones tonight. He looks at their bench, pulls his helmet all the way back down on his head. He wishes Hank were here. Then he wouldn’t feel so bad for personally bringing home this loss. Hank would say something kind of irrelevant, but still weirdly comforting, if he hadn’t needed to retire early, like: you’re still young, or, I felt old just now, watching you.

The jerseys on the bench blur into peppermint candy stripes at the very edge of Dylan’s vision as he skates past the blue line. He hangs right, decides he’s gonna cut across, go for the upper left corner. He’s been having this nightmare where he toe-picks and doesn’t even get to shoot, falls flat onto the ice and then through it, straight into the hypothermia inducing freshwater of a lake. He can feel the way the air stiffens in the sea of Sharks fans spread out behind the glass in front of him, the panoramic mural of it scuffed from errant pucks and wear. Eighteen-thousand sets of eyes can fit in this arena, and right now, it feels like there’s only twenty-four that matter. Blashill’s gonna kill him. 

It’s not like this is _ Dylan’s _ team to hold together, but, at the end of the day, like...isn’t it?

  
  


Andreas watches Dylan deal with the media from the far side of the locker room, because he claims to enjoy witnessing Dylan try to string together some meaningful words when his body is still coming down from a healthy dose of adrenaline, his thoughts knocking around like a game of bumper cars, or the stupid pyramid that always gets stuck inside a lucky eight ball. Reply hazy, ask again later. Post-loss, it’s like a snow globe in there. Dylan feels the muscles in his neck and shoulders loosen when the cameras all pack up and leave the room.

Athanasiou loiters in the doorway. “You know saying Double-A is the same amount of syllables as just calling me Andreas, right?”

“What?” Dylan says, out of it.

“The point of a nickname is to make the thing shorter. Andreas: three syllables. Double-A: also three.”

Fabbs and Tyler shove Andreas into the locker room from behind, both half undressed without jerseys on, guards on their skates making their steps near silent. Tyler’s hair is a matted, sweaty mess, and he’s got a red mark on his forehead from part of his helmet. Andreas gives Tyler a kick in the ass, then goes to lean on the door jamb again like nothing happened, letting Anthony past. 

Dylan sits back in his stall, head tipped against the wall behind him. He can’t even shower yet, ‘cause he’s still fucking sweating, and he will be for about twenty more minutes, his body’s sense of homeostasis lagging a full period behind him. It’s like being slow roasted from the inside out. He closes his eyes.

“Larkin,” says Mantha. “Buck up. It’s just a shootout. There isn’t a person on earth that thinks shootouts count as respectable hockey.”

“I’m not upset about the shootout,” Dylan says, cracking an eye.

Tuzzi whips his sweaty glove at him. “Christ, man, don’t you ever get pissed about anything? You’re so mellow and...mopey.”

“Hey, I’ve been in fights before.”

“Like, two, Larkin. Losing in shootouts, _ I’m _ fuckin’ mad.”

“I only get pissed on the ice, and now we’re off it.” Dylan knows he’s known for his competitive streak, his frustrations manifesting physically out on the rink, but by the time he gets back to the locker rooms, he always just wishes he had done a little better. “I’m not happy,” Dylan ventures. “But I’m not mad. Just a little, uh, y’know, disappointed.”

Tyler snorts. “You sound like my dad, dude.”

“I’m not your dad.”

“Yeah, no shit,” laughs Tyler. “I’d be way less cool if you were the guy that raised me.”

“On the topic of relative coolness,” Andreas interrupts, ‘cause he loves being a dickhead for the hell of it. “Can you shave that stache already? You’re starting to look like Tuzzi.”

Dylan furrows his brows. “Really?” he says, horrified.

“Hey!” Tyler whines.

Andreas holds his hands up in surrender. “Never said if that was good or bad!” 

Tyler glares at him, throwing his other glove into his face from across the locker room. 

“Besides,” Tyler says, tugging at the strap of his elbow pad, “Larkin’s got babyface. He’ll never look like me. I’m too sexy.”

“I don’t have babyface,” Dylan replies, at the same time Robby says, “You’re not sexy.”

“You’ve got babyface,” chirps Mantha, bent over in his stall to get his shin pads off. “Used to be way worse, though.”

Dylan sputters. Ten billion hours of workouts and training camp to lose the last ounce of baby fat still clinging to his cheekbones, and he’s _ still _ gonna take shit from these idiots. 

“You’re blushing, man,” Tyler says.

Dylan flushes further. “We just played sixty-three minutes of professional level hockey,” he says, defensive. “It’s normal to get a little red.”

“You weren’t out there for all sixty-three minutes,” Tuzzi teases.

Val looks up from where he’s been methodically unlacing his skates for the past two minutes in silence, neat about it, each tier loosened one by one. “Leave Dylan alone,” he says, no bite. It reminds Dylan of the flat look Val gave Tyler when he stole a handful of those gingersnap biscuits they left out on the plane ride over here. “Yzerman gets on him, you know? Haircut, image. Big poster boy. These kind of things. You are lucky it is not the rest of you.”

“Does Yzerman seriously talk to you about your haircut?” Robby says, eyebrows jumping into his hairline. Dylan almost laughs—he forgot Fabbs was even new. 

“Not—not really,” Dylan says. “It’s just, like—” when the Wings set you up under Zetterberg, the message is pretty clear. When the guy retires early and you split an A with three other players, it isn’t anymore. “Poster boy,” Dylan finishes, like that explains anything.

Tuzzi just smiles. He’s not a very good liar and probably never will be, has a face like a 4k TV screen live streaming straight out of his soul. He pats Dylan on the shoulder. “Don’t feel too much pressure,” he says. “It’s probably just ‘cause you’ve still got all your visible teeth.”

**Author's Note:**

> how can a person be from waterford


End file.
